Harish Palaniappan's

Studying technology, programming and most often robotics makes real processes that humans do everyday look like such great efforts.

When I was trying to do a voice recognition system for a client... and finally gave up with difficulties to take it up later ... I wondered how wonderfully easy we humans do voice recognition with ear and brain coordinating. To put in brief, to recognize a voice, I had to receive/record it, analyse the waveform with a stored pattern of waveforms and take the best match or highest percentage match, and identify the voice. Sounds simple but every level has complexities when you have to program it.. for instance the voice wave itself can have noise or other sounds along with it.. can be of different volume and tone since while we speak our voice has mixed tones and volume of sound. .. and all that overhead to point a few.

Wonder our brain does that in an instant. and it got self-programmed as we grew listening to sounds and learnt about them. Amazing creation this thing.. the brain. No wonder scientists are still still still trying to understand it.. we could understand things out-of-space..but not the brain yet.

The brain ... Must be the greatest creation ever.

Now coming back to the topic..Asimo.. (You also forgot is it :o)
Asimo is the name of a japenese robot brand by Honda. Asimo basically walks, climbs steps, and moves around obstacles. You should have seen this robot on TV. and it costs a few tens of millions of dollars. News is that about 4 or 5 of them are sold and operating in some businesses like restaurants.

Amazing.. what does it do.. walk around.

Do you really need this stuff at that cost to .. to just walk around. These businesses that use Asimo, obviously are not using it for the utility but the attraction that it gets as a robot. Pretty too costly attraction. You could send 100 customers to DisneyWorld and LasVegas on two week full paid trips i think..for the same cost.

Recently Asimo was again on TV.... because it learnt to climb steps without falling... yes just for that it was on TV. really. I have been climbing steps without falling every since I was 2 or 3..who bothers.

Robotics is good.. but Asimo being promoted so much is NUTS. All those industrial controlled robots which operate in nuclear sites, in automobile manufacturing units, in hospitals etc., are what can be good, useful robots.

Sony is also into this.. making robot dogs. Funny dogs they should call it instead of 'Aibo'. That again costs a few 100 thousand dollars I believe. But atleast sony has "cheaper" robot options for the show purpose, than Honda's Asimo.

Very truly.. Very often, We market things out of the way..
Aslo, we realize technology is so complex .. easy things are becoming difficult, costly and still attractive.

More reading:
Start from how the name 'robot'.
Learn about popular robotic author Isaac asimov - author of 'I, Robot'